Fat Bear Week is here!

September 21, 2025 • 8:30 am

NPR reports on one of my favorite weeks of the year: Fat Bear Week, which extends from September 23-30. (see Wikipedia article here). As you may know, the bears at issue are those in Katmai National Park, and Wikipedia tells us how the ursids qualify:

In order to qualify for Fat Bear Week, brown bears of the Katmai National Park must have been spotted catching sockeye salmon at the Brooks River.  A 1.5-mile (2.4 km) section of the river, which has webcams, is used to choose eligible bears. Bears must be seen not just in the fall but also in the summer season as well.[27]

The subjective contest is a single-elimination tournament. Each day, two bears are presented in a match-up, identified by numbers. The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. In order to evaluate which bears have gained the most weight in preparation for hibernation, the public is able to view before and after photos of specific bears, watch them on livestream feeds, and read their biographies. The biographies include information on their feeding habits, personality traits, and physical features. The winner of the final match-up is named the tournament champion.

The contest was started in 2014, and Otis has won three times, while Grazer won twice.  (Otis wasn’t there last year and he may have crossed the Rainbow Bridge.

The bears are brown bears (Ursus arctos), sometimes known as grizzly bears or “grizzlies”: a subspecies from further south.  The only larger land predator is a close relative, the polar bear, which you saw in the last post.

Click below to read more about the contest:

An excerpt:

Fat Bear Week, when people get to pick their favorite Alaskan brown bear bulking up for hibernation, is coming early this year. The annual online competition that normally starts in early October will instead start on Sept. 23. Katmai National Park and Preserve officials say the bears are magnificently plump ahead of the tournament.

“This year’s salmon run was extraordinary, with salmon numbers surpassing anything seen in recent memory,” Matt Johnson, the park’s interpretation program manager, told NPR via email. “As a result, the brown bears of Katmai are well-nourished and looking for other things to do besides scrap[p]ing with each other for food.”

The bracket for Fat Bear Week 2025 will be revealed on Sept. 22, when fans will see where familiar names of past champions, such as 128 Grazer, 480 Otis and 747— aka Bear Force One, estimated to weigh a whopping 1,400 pounds — stack up against new challengers. The single-elimination tournament starts on Sept. 23 and runs through Sept. 30, when a new champion will emerge. Fat Bear Junior, for bear cubs, started on Thursday.

Organizers expect votes to come from across the planet.

“Over one million votes were cast for the bears in 2024 from one hundred countries,” the park said as it announced this year’s dates.

The brown bears of Katmai occupy the rarest strata of celebrity: captivating and oblivious, thanks to the “bearcams” that beam their activities in the scenic Brooks Falls and other areas to online viewers around the world.

. . .The abundance of salmon in Katmai National Park and Bristol Bay in southern Alaska is contributing to a drop in conflict among the bears this year compared to the 2024 competition, which was delayed when one large bear killed another. Voters then propelled Grazer to a landslide win over the massive 32 Chunk, a bear that, months earlier, had killed one of Grazer’s cubs.

“This year there was less congregating at Brooks Falls, less fighting, and — astonishingly — noticeably more playtime with each other,” Johnson said.

Here’s a photo of Otis, four-time winner for gaining the most weight. Photo from the National Park Service:

And the Explore Live livecam of the bears fishing. Right now they’re showing highlights, which are awesome enough by alone, but wait until it goes live!

I suggest that when September 23 rolls around, you go to the Fat Bear site below (click on icon) to see the contestants and cast your vote. (There’s already been a fat cub contest, in which yearlings compete for weight gain. The winner is unnamed.)  Here are Da Roolz for Bearz:

Matchups are open for voting September 23-30 between 12 – 9  p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Pacific.

This is a single elimination tournament. For each match-up, vote for the bear you believe best exemplifies fatness and success in brown bears. The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. Only one will be crowned Fat Bear Week champion. Meet the bears, fill out your bracket, predict your fat bear winner, and campaign for your candidate.

The contestants aren’t up yet, so have a look on September 23 between noon and 9 p.m. Eastern U.S. time. It’s enormous fun to vote, and of course the fatter bears have a better chance to make it through the winter.

I hope Otis shows up this year: he was a fatty, but may not have made it through the year.

4 thoughts on “Fat Bear Week is here!”

  1. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the Sammamish River winds it’s lazy 14.3-mile course from Lake Sammamish through the cities of Bellevue, Redmond, Woodinville, and Bothel to Lake Washington, which empties through the heart of Seattle into the saltwaters of Puget Sound. I went fishing the other day in the Sammamish—for rock bass, northern pike minnow, or rainbow trout.

    The narrow, heavily modified river runs right through a lovely park. It’s so narrow that it’s easy to cast one’s lure into the bushes on the other side. One has to cast carefully to avoid losing lures. Anyway, when I got to the river it was filled with huge salmon! Some were at least two feet long, and they were jumping like crazy. I have since read that there are five different species of salmon in that small river. My wife tried to take pictures, but the fish were difficult to photograph. The sun had to shine on just the right spot in order to see the parade of giant fish heading upstream. They were jumping wildly—and would come completely out of the water—but there was no way to photograph the unpredictable leaps. I was a bit fearful that I might catch one of those lunkers and lose my line and pole—or even be pulled into the river trying to save my gear—but the salmon don’t feed once they head into fresh water.

    Oh. Right. It’s Fat Bear Week. If there were Grizzly Bears along the River (we only have Black Bears, and they aren’t interested in the salmon), they would have been there. But, I would not have been. I’m glad that the fat bears are in Alaska.

  3. I was privileged to have spent several days at Katmai in July 2009 during peak salmon run. One of the most amazing places on the planet. At times I saw as many as 40 bears fishing and fighting for salmon at the waterfall, and some of those bears are still around for the current competition. Also took a scenic flight over the volcanoes, which was incredible. To any nature enthusiast I say – put Katmai on your bucket list!

  4. The large salmon run this year is presumably due to reduced fishing during the pandemic year when the parents of these fish were returning, or so the rangers hypothesized.

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